


M

by Katsala



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, F/M, G-Gnomes, Identity Issues, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2020-02-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:35:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22686340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katsala/pseuds/Katsala
Summary: M’gann M’orzz arrived on Earth in 2007. After Queen Bee killed their loved one, she and Garfield Logan haven’t stopped running.Melanie Morse, along with her green pet lizard, arrived in Washington, D.C. today.Somewhere in the city, a telepathic force calls.
Relationships: Kon-El | Conner Kent/M'gann M'orzz
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	M

**Author's Note:**

> Edited as of 4/23/20 for typos.  
> Edited as of 10/8/20 for typos.  
> Edited for typos as of 12/28/20.

M

Melanie’s face might be her new favorite, next to Muna. The dark brown skin sets off the light eyes, and the scalp is worn bare. Melanie gets to wear crop tops and ripped jeans and any kind of jewelry as long as it’s golden. It’s a good look. 

Garfield buzzes against her mind to get her attention, and she tunes back in to him. 

‘Stop staring at yourself, sis. I’m bored.’

She snorts, picking him up and letting him crawl over her shoulder. ‘I’m not finished yet. I’m thinking about raising the cheekbones.’

‘I like them how they are.’

‘You say that no matter who I’m wearing,’ she teases, smiling. Appeasing him, she gathers up her purse and shopping bags and leaves the bathroom. Maisie Brogan, the girl who walked into the mall with a green beetle in her hair, was gone. Melanie Morse, a green lizard perched on her shoulder, was here. 

Mel slides into her red minivan, a grin spreading across her face. She has a good feeling about Washington D.C.

Mel takes them to the first restaurant she sees; Garfield complains that she didn’t choose to go to the White House, but as fun as that sounds it’s exactly the high-profile they don’t want. 

She walks straight into the kitchen, fixing people’s brains as she goes. This one has a crush on her. This one is jealous because Mel gets more tips than she does. That one was friends with her in high school. That one remembers to pay in cash after every shift. It’s easy. Almost too easy. Sometimes she worries about how she could just reach out and crush someone’s brain and it would feel like nothing-

‘You’re doing it again,’ Garfield warns her. 

Mel’s face goes hot. ‘Sorry.’ Shaking herself out of it, she puts on her uniform and starts waiting tables. 

Between orders, Garfield peeks out of her pocket. ‘Three exits, not counting the windows or the vents. Plus the windows give good visibility to the outside. We’d see Queen Bee’s people coming. I like it.’

Mel has to resist the urge to smile with pride while pouring waters. It wouldn’t go with the aesthetic. 

At the end of her shift she gets her promised cash. Garfield and her head back to the van. She finds a nice parking garage for them to stay in; she takes the backseat and he curls up in the passenger seat as a little green cat. He falls asleep before her like usual; he dreams of Marie. Mel watches it for a while before she nods off herself. 

(khhh… khhhhh… khhhhhhh… redsun. Red Sun. Red Sun.)

Mel shoots up with a shout, whacking her head on the roof of the car. Garfield clambers over the seats to her, shifting as he goes into his human form. 

“Are you okay?” he asks, sounding scared. 

“Yeah, I’m fine, I-“ she pauses when she hears the Irish accented-voice coming out of her mouth. She looks down and realizes she’s wearing Maisie again. Frustrated, she switches back to Mel. “I heard something. Some kind of telepathic interference. Nothing like Queen Bee,” she assures him, squeezing his hand. “I’ve never heard anything like it before.”

Garfield’s eyes light up. “We should investigate!”

“No way,” she says flatly. “It’s too dangerous and it isn’t our business. We need to focus on keeping a low profile.”

“…but it sounds really cool.”

“…yeah, it really does,” Mel admits.

She shuffles her way up to the driver’s seat. ‘Just this once,’ she promises him. 

Mel follows the interference to a building called Cadmus Labs. It’s one of those Earth buildings that thinks that the color white is architecture. 

‘Is this it?’ Garfield asks. 

‘Yeah. C’mon, let’s get a closer look.’

She finds a place to park up the street. She places Garfield, once again a beetle, on her shoulder, letting hair sprout out of her scalp and lengthen to cover him, before activating her camouflage. Then they walk right in the front door. 

Mel gets about ten feet inside before she sees the first of them. 

It’s perched on the shoulder of a passing scientist. It looks ghastly pale against her red hair, with its eyes and horns glowing. It turns to look at them as if it knows exactly where they are. She hears it say into both their minds, ‘Red Sun.’ Then it opens its toothy mouth and speaks aloud, “Megan Logan.”

Mel freezes.

The scientist frowns. She picks the little gremlin up and holds it in front of her face. “I didn’t know you guys could talk.” She clicks her tongue. “How about we go see Dr. Desmond and get you checked out? How does that sound, pookins?” She sets it back down and heads to the elevator.

‘You know what we have to do, right?’ Garfield asks excitedly. 

Mel resists the urge to sigh out loud. She flies over to the elevator, squeezing in just before the doors close. The scientist looks none the wiser.

‘Your judgement is going to get us killed,’ she tells him as they begin descending, far lower than should be possible in a two-story building. 

‘You’re the one following the advice of an eight year old,’ he shoots back. 

‘I liked you better when you were five. You didn’t talk back.’

They stop on Sublevel 13. The scientist gets off, but Mel hangs back, staring at the buttons. 

Garfield, picking up on her idea, says, ‘If I were an evil scientist organization, I’d keep my coolest stuff as far down as possible.’

Mel smiles. The elevator doors slide shut; she waits until the count of thirty for plausible deniability and then hits the button for the lowest floor, Sublevel 52.

When they arrive she floats out, not daring to touch the ground. The walls seem to be made of rock, and softly glowing bits of something that could either be organic or mechanical creep like vines across the stone. It reminds her a bit of a grotto in a Catholic church. It is unquestionably beautiful. 

“Thank you,” a voice says. 

Mel whirls around. Stepping out of the shadows is a tall, thin man with blue skin and horns. He looks more like the shoulder gremlin than a human, and she can feel him against her mind now, a strange fluttering sensation. He gives her a smile tinged with sadness. 

‘Who are you?’ she asks.

“I am called Dubbilex. You must be Megan and Garfield. The G-Gnomes told me you would be coming.”

Mel sends the equivalent of a mental shrug to Garfield. She uncloaks herself, reappearing the way she first looked on Earth three years before- a green-skinned version of a young Marie Logan. Garfield slithers off her shoulder and falls to the ground, shifting seamlessly from bug to snake to pacing, growling tiger. 

“Nobody calls me Megan anymore,” she informs him. 

“I think you’ll find an exception to that rule closer than you think,” Dubbilex says, smile widening. Garfield growls louder. 

“What is this place? Why did you lead us here?”

“Because you are Megan Logan, and you run from the Light.” She can actually hear the capitalization in the word. “You can keep him safe. And in exchange, there will come a time when he will return and liberate Cadmus.” His horns glow; immediately the fluttering against her mind ceases, replaced by a slippery smoothness. She tries to hold onto it, but it slides away from her like water. Dubbilex, undeterred by her attempts, walks past them to the elevator. “Until we meet again, Ms. Logan.”

And then he’s gone.

Mel shakes herself off, reaching down to stroke Garfield’s fur. ‘C’mon. Let’s go see who this mysterious ‘he’ is.’

They continue down the hallway, Mel making sure Garfield is behind her. At the end of the tunnel is a pod made of black metal and glass, emblazoned on the front with the letters ‘Kr.’ Inside is a boy- humanoid, maybe sixteen years old, wearing a white bodysuit with Superman’s symbol on the chest. Just looking at him makes Mel’s heart ache. 

‘He looks kind of like Conner from Mom’s show,’ Garfield says quietly. 

Mel runs her hand through his fur, blinking back tears. ‘Yeah. Yeah, he does.’ She sighs. ‘Genetic research lab, Superman’s symbol… he must be a clone. Probably intended to be a weapon.’

‘If he’s a weapon, is it even safe to let him out?’

Mel sucks in a breath through her teeth. ‘Probably. For me, anyway.’

She focuses first on the G-Gnomes, as Dubbliex called them, that are in the pod. She disconnects them one at a time, blunting the place where the connection was to keep them from immediately going back. The boy will probably have a headache from that, but it will pass. When that’s done she scans his mind, trying to make sure he won’t kill them on sight. 

‘Who is this?’ comes drifting along the connection. 

‘My name is Mel,’ she sends back gently. ‘This is my little brother, Garfield. I’m going to let you out, but you have to promise to behave.’ She senses resistance on his end and adds, rolling her eyes, ‘Or we could just leave you here. It’s your call.’

‘Okay. I promise.’

She crooks her fingers, telekinetically unlocking the pod door. In some places the glass cracks from the pressure, but she mostly manages it without damage. The boy finally opens his eyes as he stands up.

‘Your little brother is a tiger?’ He asks wryly. 

‘That isn’t even the weirdest part,’ Garfield tells him gleefully. 

Mel fights a smile. ‘We can talk about this in the car. Let’s go.’

“So. You two aren’t human either?” the boy asks in between bites of his McFlurry. He’s wearing Mel’s oversized leather jacket over his bodysuit and she’s fighting to keep her thoughts pure. 

“I’m not. Garfield is a… special case. He needed a blood transfusion when he was five. I was the only person close enough, and since I can shapeshift I changed my blood type to match his. There were some side effect.” She shrugs, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel. “I’m a pure Martian.”

“Like Martian Manhunter,” the boy says. 

Mel feels her face getting hot. “Yes. He’s actually my uncle; I hitched a ride to Earth on his ship. He still doesn’t know I did that.”

Garfield, using his gecko foot to flip through the pages of the baby name book they snagged, suggests, ‘Blandine.’

“That’s a girl’s name, isn’t it,” Mel says flatly. 

‘Yup.’

“Just hurry up and pick something, you two. I do not want to have to call you ‘the boy’ for a whole shopping trip.”

“You could just call me Superboy,” he tells her. 

“No. I don’t even have time to explain to you how awful that is.” She pulls into a parking space. “Literally don’t have time. Come on, I want to be in and out of here as fast as possible, malls have security cameras and you can’t shapeshift.”

The boy reaches back, takes the book from Garfield, and flips to a random page. “Fine. It’s Conner.”

Mel chokes on her own spit.

Conner, as it turns out, is the kind of person who finds one outfit they like and then buys it in bulk. She makes him compromise by getting a pair of jeans and a Flash graphic tee to go along with the eight blue shirts and eight red pants. He keeps her jacket. 

“So how do you pay for all of this?” Conner asks. They’ve just gotten back into the car after a rest stop, and she bought them each a candy bar from the vending machine. 

“I pick up shifts wherever we go. I use telepathy to insert myself into the work environment. I’ve gotten good enough that it’ll fade in a few days, so there’s no lasting damage. Still, I find it’s best to stick to smaller businesses; I tried an office building once and it went to Hell. That’s the reason we had to leave Romania.” She shrugs. “It’s fine. I never quite settled into Magdalena anyway.”

“And how long have you been doing this?”

Mel doesn’t answer for a minute. She reaches to the backseat, where Garfield is sleeping, dreaming of flying. Marie isn’t visible in this one, but they both know she’s there. “About two and a half years. Most of the time I’ve been on Earth.” She chews on one of her fingernails. “I’d always wanted to meet his mom. Marie Logan. She was an actress turned activist. I idolized her. And it was good, living with them. I felt at home for the first time in my life. Then Queen Bee came.” She’s given herself a hangnail. She scrapes the slivers of nail off her tongue and grows it back to its original length. “I saved Gar, but I couldn’t save her. I sort of… lost it, for a bit. One of her minions, a man named Psimon… we fought. I shredded his mind like it was paper. He died instantly. It was the worst feeling I’ve ever had. And that’s why she’s kept following us. She wants a replacement for her broken toy” She shakes her head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to go on like that. You don’t need me dumping on you.”

Conner reaches over and squeezes her hand. Mel smiles at him, almost feeling like she means it. “It’s fine. So. Where are we headed now?”

“Rhode Island. It’s always sounded so exotic to me, you know? Plus,” she adds, “I’ve just got a good feeling.”

“What town?”

“A place called Happy Harbor.”


End file.
